What is a Hamburger Menu? What do you Order?

Are you hungry? Do you want a hamburger?

Hamburger or Menu

Hamburger or Menu

 

More and more people are coming to your website from their mobile device. Have you thought about your mobile menu?

Your mobile view is becoming really important. When visitors to your site use their mobile device you should have a mobile responsive site.

I found this article regarding the Hamburger Menu Icon and it really made me to think if your mobile visitors really knows what it is or who is clueless to what it is.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31602745

What is a Hamburger Menu?

It’s just an icon used a placeholder for a menu that is hidden from view. When you click the icon a menu is supposed to appear.

Is it useful?

This is the part of the article that made me think the most.

The button has its benefits, he says. “The biggest one is you can put a lot of information inside it, and at the same time provide a consistent way to find this extra information. Facebook is a great example of this.”

However while the button may provide a consistent way to find extra information, research suggests it is not as functional as some might like to think it is.

“I did multiple tests,” says James Foster, a web developer based in New Zealand, who has surveyed users’ interactions with the button over the course of many months. “The results all came out the same – the icon is not as clear to some users as developers and designers think it is.”

Adding the word “menu” underneath the three lines increases the button’s use by 7.2%, according to Foster’s tests.

Putting the hamburger inside a box, so it looks like a button, increases use by 22.4%.

Switching the lines for the word “menu” makes 20% more people click, Foster found.

Should you be concerned?

It depends.

When people land on this site from mobile it is usually to read a post. I don’t expect them to surf around to other pages in my menu and I’m not particularly concerned if they don’t know how to find them.

If you have a site where other pages are more important than where they land then yes, you should start testing with different menu types. If the main landing page of your site is either the home page or a blog post but you really want them to visit your shop/store/home search/sign-up form/etc you need to make it more obvious of how to get there.

How do you know what your mobile visitors use your website?

That’s a post for another day

 

 

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Loren Nason

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